“She Did Not Find One That Was for Me”: The College Pathways of the Mexican and Central American Undocumented 1.25 Generation

2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-108
Author(s):  
DAYSI XIMENA DIAZ-STRONG
Keyword(s):  
Life Stage ◽  
Central American ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
1.5 Generation ◽  
College Going ◽  
The Us ◽  
Course Placement ◽  
Unequal Access ◽  
College Pathways ◽  
Time To Learn

In this article, Daysi Ximena Diaz-Strong draws on interviews with Mexican and Central American 1.25 generation undocumented young adults to examine what shaped their access to financial resources in their college-going transitions. Although scholars have demonstrated that school agents and peers are critical to accessing resources and that stratified schools create unequal access to resources, this knowledge derives from the experiences of the 1.5 generation, and little is known about the college pathways of the undocumented 1.25 generation. Through a social capital lens, Diaz-Strong shows how undocumented 1.25 generation immigrants encounter structural disadvantages in accessing resources and how, arriving in adolescence, they experience below-level course placement and have little time to learn the US system. This article extends our understanding of the factors shaping the college pathways of undocumented youth and shows how immigrants’ life stage on arrival interacts with school sorting mechanisms to create differential access to financial resources.

“Estaba bien chiquito” (I Was Very Young): The Transition to Adulthood and “Illegality” of the Mexican and Central American 1.25 Generation

2020 ◽  
pp. 074355842093323
Author(s):  
Daysi Ximena Diaz-Strong
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Central American ◽  
Migration Process ◽  
1.5 Generation ◽  
Sources Of Variation ◽  
K 12 ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Life Course

Knowledge on the transition to adulthood of undocumented immigrants arriving in childhood primarily derives from the experiences of minors arriving below the age of 13 years—or the 1.5 generation. The transition to adulthood of the 1.25 generation—those who immigrate between the ages of 13 and 17 years—has been largely missed. This article examines the salient challenges legal exclusion, or “illegality,” creates as the Mexican and Central American 1.25 generation launches into adulthood and the extent that “illegality” disrupts their envisioned futures. Drawing on interviews with 40 undocumented 1.25 generation young adults in Illinois, three distinct patterns were identified: (a) 1.25 generation participants who enrolled in U.S. K–12 schooling, (b) 1.25 generation men who never-enrolled in U.S. K–12 schooling, and (c) 1.25 generation women who never-enrolled. These patterns were shaped by the reasons for their migration, whether the migration process was gendered, and their expectations for adulthood. This article contributes to a more complete picture of the challenges childhood arrivals experience at a critical point of transition in the life course and the sources of variation. Moreover, attention is brought to the timing of immigration—the life-stage when a minor immigrates—as a source of differentiation warranting further consideration.

scholarly journals Not a Country or a Stereotype: Latina LDS Experiences of Ethnic Homogenization and Racial Tokenism in the American West

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 333
Author(s):  
Brittany Romanello
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Immigrant Incorporation ◽  
White Family ◽  
1.5 Generation ◽  
Cultural Heterogeneity ◽  
The Us ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Progressive Policy ◽  
The Church

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), also called Mormonism, has experienced rapid changes in its US demographics due to an influx of Latinx membership. The most recent growth in the US church body has been within Spanish-speaking congregations, and many of these congregant members are first or 1.5-generation immigrant Latinas. Using ethnographic data from 27 interviews with immigrant members living in Utah, Nevada, and California, LDS Latinas reported that while US Anglo members did seem to appreciate certain aspects of their cultural customs or practices, they also reported frequently experiencing ethnic homogenization or racial tokenization within US Church spaces and with White family members. Our findings indicate that the contemporary LDS church, despite some progressive policy implementations within its doctrinal parameters, still struggles in its ever-globalizing state to prioritize exposing White US members to the cultural heterogeneity of non-White, global LDS identities and perspectives. Latina LDS experiences and their religious adjacency to Whiteness provide a useful lens by which researchers can better understand the ways in which ethnic identity, gender, legal status, and language create both opportunities and challenges for immigrant incorporation and inclusion within US religious spaces and add to the existing body of scholarship on migration and religion.

Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon: Lost Children Archive's Reenactment Play

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Patricia Stuelke
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Central American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Road Novel ◽  
Colonial Frontier ◽  
Us Mexico Border

This essay analyzes Valeria Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive's attempt to imagine anti-imperialist solidarity aesthetics in a moment of the increasing imbrication of the US literary sphere and settler colonial capitalist surveillance of the US-Mexico border, as well as the nonprofit care regime that has arisen to oppose and ameliorate its effects. Because these structures converge around overt and subterranean investments in settler colonial frontier fantasy, the essay focuses particularly on Lost Children Archive's engagement with the tradition of the white male road novel Western in the Americas—Luiselli's attempts to write both through and against this form—as part of the novel's larger attempt to grapple with the formal problems that adhere in representing the temporality and scale of ongoing Central American Indigenous dispossession and refugee displacement in settler colonial capitalism. In exploring the degree to which the Western genre's tradition of, per Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” might oppose the brutal bureaucratic violence of the xenophobic carceral settler US state, the novel builds a critique of the frontier road novel fantasy that it cannot quite sustain.

“We are not ignorant”: Transnational migrants’ experiences of racialized securitization

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Ybarra
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Central American ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transnational Migrants

This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders—from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants’ testimonies point to the ways that US and Mexican discourses are mobilized in different—but complementary—ways that shape them as racialized subjects with differential life chances. This is clearest through a crude mapping of people onto nationalities for deportation based on hair, language, and tattoos. Beyond legal violence, deported migrants describe their vulnerability as constructed within tacit networks of collaboration between actors in the US and Mexico, both licit and illicit, in an effort to extort migrants and their families. While race is a key signifier in border securitization, the differences between these racial states have material consequences in the differential state violence in immigration enforcement.

Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 193-207
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Human History ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Tropics

Through an analysis of the documentary film The Amazon Awakens (1944) this essay posits the use of the tenets of modernization theory in the film’s representation of the Amazon as a way to invent it as a region ripe for development as long as the necessary technological and financial resources become available. In contrast to earlier “civilizing missions” that characterized the heyday of colonialism and neo-colonialism when imperial powers emphasized the need to inculcate “backward” peoples with the rudiments of modern culture and civilization, The Amazon Awakens portrays a society poised to take immediate advantage of the technology and capital the US is eager to provide. To be sure, the Amazon had to be “awakened,” and had to throw off old habits and attitudes, but the film portrays the region’s inhabitants as predisposed to do precisely that. Finally, Weinstein focuses on the elements that the movie decides to include (local industry) and exclude (ecology and indigenous rights), to argue these decisions are systematic and serve to advance and enhance a narrative of Amazonian (natural and human) history that is coherent with the film’s modernization discourse.

Part III Regimes and Doctrines, Ch.43 Transnational Migration, Globalization, and Governance: Theorizing a Crisis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Chantal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Central American ◽  
Life Changes ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Intervention

This chapter emphasizes the role of political economy, and the ways in which global governance has affected (or failed to affect) it, in generating immigration crises. Going beyond politics toward political economy illuminates both the origins of US intervention in Central America, and the ways in which that intervention has shaped migration from the region. US involvement stemmed from global power struggles over the organization of economic production: namely, its concerns about the turn to socialism, particularly after the Cuban Revolution. If foreign policy origins stemmed from economics, often so did policy tools; such measures oriented Central American economies towards the US as a destination for its exports, and increased the Central American presence of US investors and imports. They also engendered profound changes in Central American economic life: changes that each in their own way have reinforced patterns contributing to the current migration surge.

Central American-American Identity and Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maritza E. Cárdenas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Geographic Space ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
Identity Category

The use of the term “Central American” as an identity category is neither new nor restricted to the US diaspora. However, it is within the last forty years and in the geopolitical setting of the United States that a thriving identity politics has developed. It is during this time period that the use of the term Central American has emerged to denote a tactical American pan-ethnic social identity. This act of consciously employing the term “Central American” as a unification strategy for peoples from the isthmus in the United States echoes other US-based ethnoracial identity politics. Such movements often utilize a pan-ethnic term not only to advocate on the behalf of a racialized minoritarian community but also seeking to provide them a space of belonging by focusing on sociopolitical, cultural, and ethnic commonalities. As other identity markers in the United States such as “Asian American” and “African American” illustrate, Central Americans are not the first population to utilize a region as a strategic unifying term of self-identification. Yet, unlike these other US ethnoracial categories, for those who identify as “Central American” the term “Central America” often connotes not simply a geographic space but also a historical formation that advances the notion that individuals from the isthmus comprise a distinct but common culture. Another key difference from other US ethnoracial identities is that use of the term “Central American” in US cultural politics emerged during a historical era where the broader collective terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” were already in place. The creation and deployment of “Central American” is therefore an alternative to this other supra-ethnic identity category, as subjects view this isthmian-based term as being able to simultaneously create a broader collective while still invoking a type of geographic and cultural specificity that is usually associated with national identities.

scholarly journals Unequal Access to Hospital Palliative Care in the US: A State-by-State Report Card (S752)

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 558-559
Author(s):  
Maggie Rogers ◽  
Rachael Heitner ◽  
Diane Meier ◽  
R. Sean Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
Report Card ◽  
The Us ◽  
Unequal Access ◽  
State Report Card

The Tea Party Movement and the 2012 House Election

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (04) ◽  
pp. 799-805
Author(s):  
Andrew D. McNitt
Keyword(s):  
Tea Party ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Tea Party Movement ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Political Resources ◽  
The Us ◽  
House Election ◽  
Open Seat

ABSTRACTThis article examines Tea Party candidates for the US House of Representative in 2012. Tea Party and Tea Party–endorsed candidates are similar to other Republican candidates. Although they have served in the House for a shorter period, they have approximately the same financial resources, prior political experience, and reelection rate as other Republicans. Multivariate analysis finds that Tea Party membership and endorsement have no impact on electoral outcome when other political factors are controlled for (e.g., incumbency, running for an open seat, quality of opposing candidate, prior political experience, financial resources, and Obama’s vote). Consequently, the success of Tea Party candidates depends on acquiring the traditional political resources, having weak opponents, and running in favorably disposed constituencies rather than identification with this highly visible political movement.

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